We had 12 PHL controllers “volunteer” to come to the EWR side. 8 withdrew, most during the lab but some after realizing the conditions they’d face if they certified on the EWR side and said screw that. Some of the stuff they are teaching in the lab is straight up wrong, even basic things like some of the airspace maps. Out of all the class/lab instructors, only 1 ever worked the EWR area before. And since the instructors report to OKC rather than PHL, we aren’t able to change anything without a ton of back and forth.
2 EWR CPC’s were picked up as sups.
We have something like 5 or 6 people on OWCP as a result of either the radar outages and a fatal Cirrus crash that happened a few weeks ago.
3 or 4 CPC’s retire this year.
We have days where’s the only 6 CPC’s scheduled for the entire day. We’re supposed to have 14 per shift (not including mids). Throw in 1 or 2 sick hits and everything’s even more fucked.
Most of the trainees we have now are sups. I think we are supposed to have something like 10 sup trainees soon. It seems the FAA plan is to staff the area with supervisors so they can work them to death. We have always required that sups be fully certified.
So we started with 24 cpc (from 33 in N90 and full staffed is something like 46 or 48) minus 2 sups down to 22, and then by end of year down to 19 (possibly 18) due to retirements. No trainee is close to certifying.
We often are down to 1 or 2 scopes open out of 9 for the majority of the day and night aside from the shift overlap. It is too much airspace to be looking at for one person especially with nice weather and 1000 VFR targets trying to kill everyone.
